What is very active?

seth5052

This is more for fun because I want to debate someone from mfp... but when selecting activity level the examples for very active are - bike messenger and carpenter. Who came up with that???

As someone who worked as a bike messenger during college in Chicago and also works as a carpenter now... let me tell you, they are NOT the same activity level, like not even close. I would sprint across downtown chicago for 8 hours a day doing deliveries, there was no tracking back then so I have no idea how many miles I rode a day (or the step count, we had to go in and out of buildings all day). There were slower older guys but we would race cars, race each other. It was all aerobic 8 hours a day plus full on sprints mixed in. There were no overweight bike messengers. You got paid based on the number of deliveries you made each day so the incentive was to be fast, slow and out of shape = not much money.

However, there are overweight carpenters, plenty of beer bellys, and generally unhealthy people in this profession (they can definitely eat like they're very active). It can be very active, I happen to be, but carpentry is not an aerobic job, you can be a sedentary carpenter. You're never elevating your heart rate. There are lifting and strength components, there are definitely some strong people, but a lot of the carpenters I know would have trouble running a mile... 400m would probably be a struggle tbh.

For very active it's either bike messenger or carpenter (and bike messengers are then closer to pro athletes in terms of activity level)... but it's not both. This is my hill that I will die on! ha

neanderthin

Maybe they though it was a carpenter who was also a lumberjack. But yeah, I agree, they aren't even close. It's a numbers game and in reality it's just finding your actual maintenance over a period of time that would indicate and represent an average, then deduct from there. Most people don't do that and use calculators and then are curious why they're not achieving their anticipated goals.

cmriverside

Yeah, what neanderthin says.

Pick an Activity Level in the middle. Log food for 4-6 weeks. At the end of that time, adjust if necessary. It's an experiment only you can run and the results depend on how you do it over time.

AnnPT77

seth5052 wrote: »

This is more for fun because I want to debate someone from mfp... but when selecting activity level the examples for very active are - bike messenger and carpenter. Who came up with that???

As someone who worked as a bike messenger during college in Chicago and also works as a carpenter now... let me tell you, they are NOT the same activity level, like not even close. I would sprint across downtown chicago for 8 hours a day doing deliveries, there was no tracking back then so I have no idea how many miles I rode a day (or the step count, we had to go in and out of buildings all day). There were slower older guys but we would race cars, race each other. It was all aerobic 8 hours a day plus full on sprints mixed in. There were no overweight bike messengers. You got paid based on the number of deliveries you made each day so the incentive was to be fast, slow and out of shape = not much money.

However, there are overweight carpenters, plenty of beer bellys, and generally unhealthy people in this profession (they can definitely eat like they're very active). It can be very active, I happen to be, but carpentry is not an aerobic job, you can be a sedentary carpenter. You're never elevating your heart rate. There are lifting and strength components, there are definitely some strong people, but a lot of the carpenters I know would have trouble running a mile... 400m would probably be a struggle tbh.

For very active it's either bike messenger or carpenter (and bike messengers are then closer to pro athletes in terms of activity level)... but it's not both. This is my hill that I will die on! ha

Any "activity level" is going to be a range. Humans, looking across a population of them, have a huge continuum of activity levels. It isn't individual discrete levels, each clearly distinct from the next. It's like an uphill slope starting at someone in a coma in bed, going up to - I dunno - something like professional endurance athletes or your bike messengers or something. Time of activity matters to calorie burn, as does duration, frequency, intensity, type of movement, and more. IOW, that even means it isn't really a slope, because there are multiple dimensions to "activity".

Having few "activity levels" in MFP (or a TDEE calculator) is a huge simplification, picking out arbitrary points along that big multidimensional human activity continuum.

Consider the example jobs as things somewhere near that arbitrary point in each case. If you want, think of "carpenter" as the low end of active, and "bike messenger" as the high end. (Though that's not really true either, because of the simplification.)

It doesn't matter. It's just a starting estimate for your personal science fair experiment.

Make a good guess, follow the output regimen for 4-6 weeks (whole menstrual cycles for those to whom that applies), then look at average weekly weight change over that whole time period. Then, if you could healthfully and happily lose weight a little faster, eat fewer calories. OTOH, if you're losing too fast, maybe even seeing danger signs like weakness, fatigue or hair thinning, or you're punitively hungry to the point that you can't stick with your calorie goal, then eat a little more.

That will give you a personalized calorie target for you as an individual, not some oversimplified estimate. Then keep monitoring and adjusting as needed. That'll work fine for most people.

P.S. I recognize and appreciate that you're being careful and analytical about this stuff. That's good. That impulse can serve you well as you continue.

I'm not sure this next is true for you, but as a general human tendency, our brains tend to resist making major changes in routine that are going to be challenging, no matter how theoretically beneficial. One of the ways that can manifest is finding flaws in the methodology, which psychologically become reasons why it can't work, so we shouldn't even try.

Thing is, for many people (not all), calorie counting can work, despite being an edifice of estimates and approximations. Pretty close on average, with some self-correction mechanisms along the way: That can work. It has worked for a lot of people here, among whom I'm one.

P.P.S. IMO, you haven't necessarily even picked the biggest conceptual problem with these estimates, but there's no point in my saying what I think that is, because (1) it doesn't matter either, for the same general reasons as outlined above; and (2) that's a whole different debate.

Best wishes!

Jacq_qui

I've just switched to TDEE after a long while using the MFP strategy. I am a few weeks in and prefer it - especially as it helps me eat similarly from day to day, but the activity level was really hard to pick and definitions were wholly unapplicable to me!